Q1. Quality is a collection of attributes.
Various people define those attributes differently, but a commonly accepted collection is portability, reliability, efficiency, human engineering, testability,
understandability, and modifiability.
Q2. Quality is not the same as satisfying users, meeting requirements, or meeting cost and schedule targets. However, all these things have an interesting relationship: User satisfaction = quality product + meets requirements + delivered when needed + appropriate cost.
As someone who specializes in quality, I'd say either he was wrong, or the practical definition has shifted.
What he calls "user satisfaction" is what I would equate with "product quality," at least in terms of what we mean when we aim for a particular quality bar before releasing. The various factors he lists as comprising quality are aspects of satisfaction that may or may not apply to a given audience of users, but the absence of one or more does not necessarily indicate low quality unless it's relevant to the user.
Compare Twitter when it started with Twitter now, for example. When it started, it was a relatively unreliable product, but still high quality for its set of users--at the very least, it was high enough quality that spending time and money to raise it may not have been a good idea. It was successful as it stood. Now the set of users and their expectations have shifted, both because the field's bar has raised in general and because it has enterprise use, so reliability is a much bigger deal. It's still high quality, but for different reasons.
Some of those things (portability, testability, modifiability) are simply conflating code quality with product quality, unless what you're developing is a code component. Even efficiency is meaningless to quality unless inefficiency causes the -customer- to bear more load. Maybe he meant to conflate those things, but I don't think they belong together. They're rather orthogonal: vim is a high product-quality app with (supposedly, haven't read it) pretty awful code quality. Conversely, I've seen plenty of pretty codebases that produced crappy apps.
And meeting requirements, delivering at an appropriate time (which is another form of meeting a requirement) and at an appropriate cost (yet another form of meeting a requirement), these are all absolutely important aspects of quality. The scale of quality a free-as-beer product is measured on will always be different than one a paid product will be measured on.
Basically, he's taking a very absolute approach to quality, rather than considering context. There's really no such thing as a "high quality product" in the absolute. It's all relative to the intended audience and use.
I will agree, though, that quality goes way beyond sheer absence of objective software defects. It's a shame that most of the industry tries to define it that way.
Q2. Quality is not the same as satisfying users, meeting requirements, or meeting cost and schedule targets. However, all these things have an interesting relationship: User satisfaction = quality product + meets requirements + delivered when needed + appropriate cost.
As someone who specializes in quality, I'd say either he was wrong, or the practical definition has shifted.
What he calls "user satisfaction" is what I would equate with "product quality," at least in terms of what we mean when we aim for a particular quality bar before releasing. The various factors he lists as comprising quality are aspects of satisfaction that may or may not apply to a given audience of users, but the absence of one or more does not necessarily indicate low quality unless it's relevant to the user.
Compare Twitter when it started with Twitter now, for example. When it started, it was a relatively unreliable product, but still high quality for its set of users--at the very least, it was high enough quality that spending time and money to raise it may not have been a good idea. It was successful as it stood. Now the set of users and their expectations have shifted, both because the field's bar has raised in general and because it has enterprise use, so reliability is a much bigger deal. It's still high quality, but for different reasons.
Some of those things (portability, testability, modifiability) are simply conflating code quality with product quality, unless what you're developing is a code component. Even efficiency is meaningless to quality unless inefficiency causes the -customer- to bear more load. Maybe he meant to conflate those things, but I don't think they belong together. They're rather orthogonal: vim is a high product-quality app with (supposedly, haven't read it) pretty awful code quality. Conversely, I've seen plenty of pretty codebases that produced crappy apps.
And meeting requirements, delivering at an appropriate time (which is another form of meeting a requirement) and at an appropriate cost (yet another form of meeting a requirement), these are all absolutely important aspects of quality. The scale of quality a free-as-beer product is measured on will always be different than one a paid product will be measured on.
Basically, he's taking a very absolute approach to quality, rather than considering context. There's really no such thing as a "high quality product" in the absolute. It's all relative to the intended audience and use.
I will agree, though, that quality goes way beyond sheer absence of objective software defects. It's a shame that most of the industry tries to define it that way.